Red Bull’s Rear Wing Design: Why High-Speed Crashes Are Happening

Max Verstappen crashed at Turn 9 in Austria during qualifying. Days later, he spun into the gravel at Stowe at Silverstone during the race. Two separate incidents. Two high-speed corners. One common culprit: Red Bull’s unconventional rear wing design.

The FIA is investigating the style of rear wings used by Red Bull and Ferrari. Red Bull has admitted it has a problem with its rear wing design. But the issue isn’t about rule-breaking—it’s about physics colliding with regulation.

The 225-Degree Problem

Red Bull’s flip-over rear wing rotates approximately 225 degrees from fully open to fully closed. Conventional DRS-style rear wings rotate approximately 45 degrees. The gap between them is striking.

Why such an extreme rotation? The FIA requires rear wings to transition from one mechanical position to another in less than 0.4 seconds. Red Bull’s system closes five times faster than a conventional DRS-style wing to meet that requirement. Speed that extreme brings its own dangers.

The real problem emerges when the wing closes: the airflow cannot reattach smoothly to the surface. Instead, it separates. At high-speed corners that demand minimal braking—around 0.5 seconds at Turn 9 in Austria and Stowe at Silverstone—that sudden loss of downforce becomes deadly. Grip vanishes. Control follows.

Red Bull built a wing to satisfy the rulebook. The rulebook, paradoxically, created a design that destabilizes the car exactly when the driver needs it most.